James Haliburton

CEO & Co-founder de Topp

“From first screen, to second screen to no screen”

There are 3 trends that are impacting and changing the mobile industry, what’s happened so far to suggest they are a trend, and what might happen moving forward. The three trends are:

Access over ownership - Recent years have seen a massive shift in how people want and do think about “owning” something. Most people are now happy with a simplified access story rather than a need to own outright. This is true for physical objects (ex. swapping household appliances), digital content (ex. my photos stored in the cloud), and services (ex. task rabbit). It’s a long trend, but many trend forecasters think we have not yet reached the peak of impact yet. I have some predictions of what we might see next.

Screenless Digital Experiences - IoT(Internet of things), connected home, wearables, smart cities, and other smart objects are emerging in consumers’ lives. Many of these experience have very small or no screens at all. Most of these are being pushed into consumers’ lives because the technology is ready, not necessarily because it’s solving a unique problem or desire expressed by the consumers. This can makes the design and marketing stories difficult cultivate. I’d like to share some good and bad examples and where we could go with screenless experiences in the future.

Holistic Experiences: Consumers are expecting and starting to get more holistic experiences that use multiple partners to solve a single problem (in the consumer’s point of view). For example, Nest and Mercedes-Benz partnered up to allow your car to tell your home how long until you get home so your home is the perfect temperature when you arrive home. But these are getting more and more complicated, involving more and more partners, making the unique contributions to the solutions less distinguishable from each other. And we have just seen the tip of the iceberg on this trend.